Ballet Rhapsody staged by Frederick Ashton and his predecessors

Abstract

The premiere of the ballet Rhapsody, staged by Frederick Ashton, took place in 1980 on the occasion of the Queen Mother’s eightieth birthday. The ballet was set to the music of Rhapsody on Themes of Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninov and was created especially for Mikhail Baryshnikov. The performance is a plotless opus, based compositionally on a musical structure. The presence of two contrasting symbolic themes opened up an abundance of possibilities for contrast for the choreographer. Ashton contrasted the soloist with the ensemble, the Russian school of classical ballet with the English system. The first is associated in the world with an unshakable tradition, the second personifies the birth of the new, experimental. In 1960, the Soviet choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky staged the ballet «Paganini», a program work, close in form to a choreosymphony, to the same music. While working on the image of Paganini, Leonid Lavrovsky turned to an earlier production of this ballet — Mikhail Fokine, created on the initiative of the composer himself. Mikhail Fokin staged his ballet «Paganini» on 1939 in the tradition of the prewar Dyagilev’s Russian ballet. The article presents an overview of productions to the music of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, as well as an analysis of the expressive means and Frederick Ashton’s compositional techniques in his ballet «Rhapsody».